The political, social and economic evolution of pre-independent Trinidad was shaped by constant shifts in British colonial policy between the two World Wars. Singh reveals the subtleties and complexities of day-to-day life in a truly multi-racial society where the whites, the blacks, and the East Indians were not the only ethnics involved in the political, social and economic dynamics of colonial Trinidad on the eve of internal self-government and ultimately its independence in 1962. Singh examines the relationships between capital and labour, racial groups and classes, the policies of the imperial and local government, the rise of protest against (and accommodation to) those policies and prejudices by individuals, fledgling trade unions and political groups in this book about the twentieth-century awakening of political consciousness in the British Caribbean colony.